Clearly having only a day or two to go until your exam is not ideal, but at some point, we all get to the stage where there is very little time left. Whether you have been working systematically through your learning and revision all year or have left it all a bit too late, there are still several important things that you can do at this stage. The following applies to the final day before the exam and will be expressed as such, although if you are planning ahead, these revision tasks would be best begun with two days to go!

Planning

Your main focus at this stage should be on dividing up the remaining available study time into short, focused blocks of around 25 minutes, with short breaks in between (i.e. using the pomodoro technique). Write this schedule down, with the timings of each of the study sessions you can fit in during the day—doing so will only take a few minutes, and the external written list of times will help you to stick to the plan (as will setting a countdown timer on your phone for each session). Allow a decent amount of time for meal breaks, though. And don’t plan on either getting an early night or staying up late—neither of these things will help.

Make sure your study space is comfortable and quiet, that you have water and snacks to hand, and use the five-minute breaks in between sessions to get a bit of exercise (even just walking outside for some fresh air and back again).

You can’t relearn your course in a day, but you can familiarise yourself with the exam format in that time. From my own teaching experience, I feel that exam technique can make as much as a 10% difference to a student’s eventual grade. Therefore, even with such a short time to go, it’s worth using the first of your study sessions to look over the format of the exam (if that information is available), and check that you know all of the key details: how long the exam paper is, how many marks each section is worth, what is mandatory and what is optional, and so on. Take notes of these details as you go, and look over them all one more time just before the exam starts. Later in the day you will be doing exam practice which will consolidate this new understanding (it’s also worth double checking where and when the exam is, if you’re not sure).

The morning's study sessions

For your remaining study sessions in the morning before the exam, you should focus on rapid-fire retrieval of key terms and concept knowledge. For all types of exam, it’s going to be really valuable to work through these key terms and test yourself. Granted, this is cramming, and not the best way to learn over the long-term, but with a day to go it’s your most effective option, and when you make use of retrieval practice it will result in some real gains (in contrast to passive activities such as re-reading class notes or highlighting textbook chapters).

The main focus should be testing yourself using flashcards, practice questions, or other sets of course content–you may be able to find ready-made sets of flashcards on Quizlet.com if you haven’t previously prepared any (or substitute a detailed list of key terms). In each of your 25-minute study sessions, work through a set of flashcards, a set of multiple choice questions, testing yourself until you get all of the answers right.

As you get the answer to each flashcard correct, put it to one side, so that you have a gradually decreasing bundle left in your hands. Keep going until you have got every answer correct at least once. With terms and definitions, it is a good idea to start with the definitions (i.e. recalling the terms) and then switching the sides of the cards in order to do the more challenging task of remembering the definitions from looking at the term. This means you will go through all of them again, retrieving key information from memory once more.

Practice Exam questions

As the day goes on, you might want to switch to a more exam-specific strategy. One excellent option would be to work through all of your flashcards in the morning (shuffle them all together, to gain the benefits of interleaved practice) and then move on to practicing specific exam-style questions later.

For exam papers which are made up partly or entirely of short-answer or multiple-choice questions, you should now be in a position to answer such questions quickly and confidently, having just revised the key terms that morning. Do so without referring to your notes, to ensure that you are actively drawing on memory (yes, it may feel uncomfortable, but it’s much more beneficial!).

Check through all your answers (assuming answers are freely available; if unavailable, contact a friend or use Google). If there were any that you found a struggle to answer, check these particularly carefully—you will learn a lot from tackling the gaps, for if the same question comes up in tomorrow’s exam, your revision session will be recent enough in mind that you should have a clear episodic memory of struggling with the question and then looking up the answer.

There may be a few areas that you still really struggle with even after going through practice questions, and for these it would be worth creating simple verbal or visual mnemonics.

For exam papers that involve writing more extended answers, take a few minutes at the start of each of the afternoon’s short study sessions to look at practice questions/past paper questions on that topic, paying attention to any key command term used (e.g. describe, evaluate). This can make a major difference to the outcome, and it’s worth noting which ones come up most often. If you don’t already have a set of practice questions, it’s probably too late to get teacher/lecturer advice on this, but use social media to ask your classmates—the chances are, someone has already compiled a list and will be willing to share it with you. Again, answering these questions is most valuable without referring to your notes, but do check your answers at the end of the study session.

If you’re going to be dealing with full-length essay questions then clearly you won’t have time to write a practice answer to every possible question in a single afternoon. However, you can pick some of the most likely ones to come up, covering all the possible sub-topics. In each study session you should write a detailed plan that lists what would go into an essay answer, dividing the essay up paragraph by paragraph.

If available, refer to model essay answers, considering details such how they set out an introduction, how many paragraphs they have, how long they are overall in terms of word count, and how much detail is given in the supporting evidence used.

Overall, high priorities with a day to go include:

Ensuring that you are clear on the format of the exam.

A final run-though of key terms and concepts, testing yourself on flashcards.

If your exam is close, it’s time to really focus. There’s no room for procrastination, but you do still have enough time (if you use it well) to seriously upgrade your level of detailed knowledge as well as your exam technique. This post explains how evidence from the science of learning can help you make the best use of the study time you have left.

The first thing you should do is to make sure you have all of the materials you need. This includes your textbook(s), classroom notes, sets of flashcards, your own summaries or concept maps based on your reading, and any available past papers or lists of practice questions.

Regarding where to work, you don’t need to have a single study space, but at least have an idea of where you are going to get your revision done - somewhere quiet where you have a good amount of space and can spread out your books and plug in your laptop. Where do you work best? (“At a friend’s house” is the wrong answer! Multi-tasking makes learning much harder, and it's unlikely that you will fully concentrate on the task at hand with other people around). Interestingly, psychologists agree that it’s worth dividing your study between several places, to avoid the memories becoming too context-specific.

Another valuable thing to do with at a week or more to go is to run through all of your revision flashcards. This will help to refresh detailed knowledge ahead of the remainder of your study sessions. Test yourself until you get each concept right at least once.

If you haven’t been making revision flashcards all year, it’s too time consuming to start now - either find some online via a site like Quizlet.com (there’s a good chance that previous students from your course have made their flashcards freely available - for example, here's a set I made on the psychology topic of sleep), or make do with testing yourself on items from the glossary of your textbook or a similar list of key terms.

Next, it’s time to take a realistic look at how much time you have left for revision. Sketch a rough timetable which includes each study session and break. This should focus around identifying short slots if time – around an hour is fine (the pomodoro technique, where you study in 25 minute bursts, is ideal for a single day but probably too intensive to do for a whole week, at least in my opinion). It would be a good idea at this stage to follow your school or university timetable, if you have one – this is an already-learned structure which will be much easier to stick to than a brand new timetable that you have only just invented.

Overall, you can probably fit in around 5 hour-long sessions per day. For most people there’s little point in trying to do more than this in a single day - you’ll just burn out. Really long study sessions also tend not to be very productive, especially if they are interspersed with chatting with friends, listening to music, or checking social media (in fact, it’s probably best to confine all your social, with family or friends, to a certain time of the day, e.g. at the end of the day once your work is done).

Next, allocate each topic or subtopic to one of the study sessions. For example if your course had four topics and each of these had three subtopics, then you have 12 subtopics to divide between the available sessions. According to the advice above, you should have 35 sessions available across seven days, so each subtopic can be allocated more than once. That’s fine - it means that you’ll go back to each area of the course after a few days and study it again consolidating what you have already done. However, keep the last couple of days of your plan clear, both as a contingency in case of illness, and to allow time for a final run through of your flashcards to consolidate terminology or other learning of finer details. In addition, you must take proper breaks, whether whole days or the occasional afternoon/morning – it’s your choice. This probably means that you will have more like 50 1-hour study sessions over a fortnight.

What should you actually do during each study sessions? One of the best things at this stage is to write concept maps from memory to check that you still remember how topics fit together, and don’t have any gaps in your overall understanding. It’s really important to do this from memory, not by copying - Blunt & Karpicke (2014) showed that retrieval of content was more important than the process of writing the maps. However, maps still provide an overview which shows how topics link together, which is something you don't get from linear notes. If you haven't used them before, concept maps show concepts linked together by logical statements such as "is a part of" - you can see an example here.

Another very valuable task is to work through your textbook or your own written summaries (or both), checking your level of recall and understanding. Passive re-reading is an ineffective study strategy (Callender & McDaniel, 2009) so instead you should aim to use a strategy called elaborative interrogation. This means asking questions as you go through each part of the text, and in particular asking yourself “why” questions – promoting analytical skills which are so important for exams. This is a useful technique at any stage of your studies but particularly now during revision, because the technique has been shown to work better after schema knowledge has been developed (Woloshyn et al., 1992). If you have used the Cornell notes system, you will already have key questions written down one side of your classroom notes, and can use these!

Writing a concept map plus working through the reading may well take a couple of study sessions, or even more. How does your rate of study compare with how many topics/sub-topics you have to cover? The time you have left is fixed, so if you are going too fast or too slow, you can make some adjustments now. If you have time to tackle a 3rd or 4th session on each sub-topic, then move on to writing out full exam-style questions - you are likely to be ready to do well in them having already worked through the content in detail. Again, a more active task is preferable, so even if you have already written out practice essays during the year, it’s more valuable to re-write one from memory (prompting retrieval practice) rather than reading through your previous attempts.

If you come across areas where you feel confused, there may still be enough time to get some help from your teacher or lecturer at this stage. However, as time ticks down and you find yourself with only a few days left, don’t spend the time travelling in to university or school (which would use up valuable time that could be spent studying). Instead, make contact by email; it’s not unreasonable to send a short list of queries with a few days still to go, and most teachers will be happy to address these.

Top priorities with a week to go

- Ensuring you have all of your key materials including past papers and flashcards.- Running through key content using flash cards.- Planning your remaining time, dividing days into around 5 short study sessions that follow your usual timetable.- Allocating subtopics to each study session, covering every topic twice or more but allowing for days/afternoons off.- Moving on to writing practice questions.- Making contact with your teacher by email if there are areas of particular difficulty.

Advice on Revision, Part 2 will focus on the final 1-2 days before your exam.

Interleaving examples of different species of animal can help learners to remember these new categories and to transfer this learning when trying to identify novel examples. Image: Pixabay.

I thought I'd share a slightly extended version of my answer to a question about spacing and interleaving from the CogSciSci email group.

The question essentially asked what spacing and interleaving might look like in practice when teaching science (I have written about these two concepts in much more detail and in ways that apply to multiple teaching subjects in my book with Marc Smith, Psychology in the Classroom).

The spacing effect means that when study and re-study are separated by a delay, this benefits learning. It could involve study of anything - a lot of the evidence has focused on vocabulary, so an obvious link to science would be to use spacing for terminology. Although it's counterintuitive to think that waiting longer before restudy would be helpful, an element of forgetting actually seems to help, in comparison to following up on something more quickly. A useful analogy is to imagine painting a wall - it's better to wait, because there's no point in applying the second coat until the first one has dried.

When spacing out practice, a longer gap is better than a short one; there is almost no limit to this, but for practical reasons you probably don't want to space by more than a few weeks within a typical course. Still, it's really important to point out that the information needs to be well learned in the first session, otherwise it will simply be forgotten with no benefit to spacing. The learners need to have really got it at that point. As Rawson & Dunlosky (2011) put it, "our prescriptive conclusion for students is to practice recalling concepts to an initial criterion of 3 correct recalls and then to relearn them 3 times at widely spaced intervals" (p. 283).

The term interleaving refers to varying the order of a set of tasks or examples, whereby each item is immediately followed and preceded by an example of a different category/concept rather than appearing in blocks of the same type of item repeatedly (which is termed a ‘blocked’ arrangement). It could arise due to a randomisation or ‘shuffling’ of the order of items, or a more deliberate alternation of items (e.g. presenting geoscience pupils with an example of a u-shaped glacial valley, then an example of a river valley, then another glacial valley, and so on).

There are two main things you can interleave - initial learning or practice. The evidence is pretty good that for practice, interleaving different types of examples is a good idea, rather than doing lots of the same type of practice problem. This has been best demonstrated for maths (e.g. Rohrer et al, 2015), though a similar idea could be applied to any subject with lots of short answer or multiple-choice questions. The key thing is to mix up lots of different types of problems/questions rather than present them categorised by type (so not, for example, giving learners a set of problems that are all about multiplying fractions).

It may be that you would tend to interleave practice questions like this anyway, but it's probably quite common in classrooms to give learners lots of practice of recent material and skills, rather than interleaving these with past examples. One reason for the benefit is that interleaving seems to help learners recognise what strategy to use in later tests - the unpredictable order means it's not immediately obvious what concepts and strategies are going to be needed in order to answer the question. It therefore helps them learn to read and analyse questions.

For initial learning, interleaving involves presenting different, easily confused concepts side by side, rather than several examples of the same thing being presented together, and again this has benefits compared to categorising items into a 'block' of the same type. It has relevance to any sort of concept learning, including for science subjects, although most of the research conducted so far has been done on abstract stimuli (such as shapes and patterns) rather than educational materials. Two useful studies that are directly relevant to science are Eglington & Kang (2017), who used interleaved examples of chemical molecules, and Rawson et al (2015), who gave definitions of new psychology concepts and then interleaved real world examples of the concepts. Both studies found that interleaving was advantageous compared to presenting multiple examples of the same concept.

The benefit seems to derive from the interleaved order making it easier for learners to identify key differences between concepts that are easily confused, and for this reason, it's not going to be helpful if concepts are very different (because nobody would confuse them). For example, nobody is going to mix up a fish with a bird, but they might confuse a reptile and an amphibian, so the latter categories might benefit from presenting learners with interleaved examples.

An important point for both types of interleaving is that they don't just improve memory for previous examples, but also make learners better able to categorise new examples (i.e. they showed transfer of learning).

Spacing and interleaving have implications for how teachers plan and structure lessons and topics, though they also relate to students' revision. In my next post, I'll give some advice on how these techniques can be put to use to help make revision more effective - ideal for exam season!

If you are a science educator interested in applying cognitive science to your work, you can apply to join the CogSciSci email group here.

Career progression: is there enough scope - and enough practical support - for teachers to keep developing and challenging themselves throughout their career? Image: Fras333

The quality of teaching matters to how well pupils do at school. So how do we, as a society, encourage high-quality and experienced teachers to stay in the classroom rather than leave the profession or move into management?

It is becoming a major issue well beyond Scotland, too, with record numbers of teachers leaving south of the border. Teaching unions have spoken of a perfect storm of negative conditions: funding cuts which have reduced (real terms) pay, increasing workload and hours, and the likely impact of Brexit on the availability of teachers from the EU, among other pressures.

This problem is of personal interest and relevance to me as someone who works in an HE education department, as my day job involves preparing and educating new trainee teachers. However, my role also puts me in the category of someone who has left the school classroom! I see this choice as being largely due to my enthusiasm for helping to develop the new generation of Psychology teachers at a key time for the subject's development in Scottish schools, but it's also the case that I was motivated by a desire for pedagogy-related career progression which was otherwise absent.

Progression

Both reports mentioned above highlight the need to find ways of motivating experienced classroom teachers to remain in post. This excerpt comes from the Teacher Workforce report:

The Chartered Teacher Scheme was withdrawn in 2012, having previously provided a way for pay increases to teachers who undertook a course of further academic study. A number of colleagues had attained Chartered Teacher status during my early years of school teaching (my first permanent secondary post began in 2001), and it seemed to me that the view of the Scheme among the staff as a whole was quite negative. In particular, people who were not Chartered did not feel that it rewarded the 'best' teachers or significantly benefited the pupils.

Nevertheless, it certainly did provide an option for progression outside of promotion to management, a route which does not appeal to everyone (and not can everyone be a manager), and which inevitably results in reduced classroom time for the promoted staff member.

Scotland is keen to emulate other countries such as Finland in making teachers a Masters-level profession. This is welcome, but is not likely to tackle all of the issues around retention of staff, given that Masters qualifications tend to be completed early in the teaching career, and are therefore not likely to function as an incentive for more experienced staff to remain in teaching.

It can, of course, be argued that establishing this level of qualification (or above) as the norm will result in teachers being treated as professionals to a greater degree, and that this higher regard throughout society would impact on teacher retention and make teachers less demoralised. I certainly think it could help - though it could be argued that UK teachers already have relatively high status compared to the European norm. Clearly the nature of the job itself also plays a key role, irrespective of career progression; going hand-in-hand with societal respect, we urgently need greater agency for teachers to manage learning and exercise professional judgement in their own classrooms, rather than the more top-down accountability processes which are increasing worldwide. It is also vital to reduce the workload associated with a non-stop round of curriculum updates. However again, these things don't apply specifically to the experienced professionals who exit teaching.

Could a Chartered Teacher programme be reintroduced with more success? I don't think the negative attitudes that I mentioned can be put down just to jealously over colleagues' higher pay; departmental heads, in contrast, tend to be viewed positively by colleagues, with fellow teachers recognising their commitment and hard work. It seemed like Chartered Status was resented in part because it seemed like money for nothing - besides being supposedly expert practitioners, the Chartered Teachers didn't actually do anything more for the school than their colleagues did on an ongoing basis. The other side of this coin is that it provided little for a Chartered Teacher to engage with intellectually. They role wasn't any different, and therefore beyond their initial studies there wasn't much to maintain motivation and provide a sense of purpose.

It follows that there is a need for a means of progression for classroom teachers which is linked to a clear role of benefit to the school - a quid pro quo, where the promoted member of staff is doing something of tangible value, akin to that provided by departmental heads and other middle management, and in doing so gains genuine and meaningful progression throughout their career.

Mentors

One possibility is to establish a specialist mentor role for those who guide and support trainee teachers during their work placements. This possibility is hinted at in the Teacher Workforce report, which refers to an additional time allocation for mentoring of students:

Having mentored two student teachers last year, I can confirm that it is certainly time consuming (if anyone thinks that the students do all your teaching while you get a break, this is far from the case!), but it is also professionally challenging and very rewarding. The idea that teachers in positions could have a reduction in teaching workload is interesting, and it would be useful to know exactly what this would involve. To do it well, freeing up time for professional reading, meetings and detailed feedback, something like 20% of contact time, equivalent to a day a week for a full time teacher, would seem reasonable to me. Any less and it is likely to result in increased stress for the mentor, and make it hard to guide students as well as it should be done.

This could provide a specialist route that would allow the most skilled practitioners to not only remain in the classroom, but to make their teaching craft (and perhaps, specific aspect of that craft) a specialism. It would be of benefit to trainees, too, who would be mentored by a motivated expert teacher rather than someone who lacks the time and/or experience to fully support them.

Teacher-researchers

Another possible route for professional progression, via an essentially similar model, would be to create a teacher-researcher role. In my previous school, a number of teachers engaged with research as part of a research centre (see 'Can teachers be researchers?'), and the GTCS and other teaching bodies encourage practical research engagement for teachers (often termed 'practitioner enquiry' - but that's another debate!).

However, the objection that is most often raised by teachers about the prospect of conducting or otherwise engaging with research is that they lack time.

A reduced workload, again of around 20% of contact time while otherwise remaining in teaching duties, could facilitate teacher research engagement very significantly. Most teachers can see the value of research, and it typically links intimately with classroom practice (for example, research into memory, motivation, etc, or research which develops their specialised subject knowledge). Given time to do it properly and to develop the required technical skills, they are much more likely to engage with the research community more broadly, follow high standards and produce good quality work. It would provide a stimulating addition to their teaching work that might help to motivate teachers who would otherwise choose not to remain in a teaching role. What's more, their research work could be part of a school-wide agenda and the findings shared with colleagues, circumventing the criticism of Chartered Status discussed above, i.e. that they weren't contributing anything extra to the school on an ongoing basis.

I'm aware that a significant number of schools/clusters in England and Wales have established a 'research lead' role, and while very interesting, this is not really what I'm advocating - such a position is essentially unique within the institution (we can't all be the research lead!) - and I'm more interested in a route that any experienced teacher could potentially undertake.

As a follow-on from the prospect of engaging more teachers as researchers, any school in which teachers are conducting active data gathering should have an ethical approval process. Again, in my previous role, this was done by volunteers on top of a full teaching workload. Making a position on a research ethics board (which could be run across a cluster of schools rather than one) a specialised form of teacher-researcher role - with extra pay and a time allocation - seems to me a more sustainable model, and one that would encourage those who do it to prioritise it appropriately and to develop the necessary skills and knowledge.

In short, I don't think the answer to the retention crisis is for teachers to do another qualification and then essentially be handed money for nothing for the rest of their career. I do think that they should be offered one or more pathways for career progression that would mean still being in the classroom for the majority of their contracted hours, but would add a stimulating new challenge which was of broader benefit along with increased pay. As well as the prospect of advancement without the need to enter management, such roles would be highly motivating to experienced professionals who perhaps feel that they have developed their skills as far as they can in a standard classroom role.

I have suggested two key types of promoted role - student mentor and teacher-researcher. I'm sure that there are other possibilities, including in pastoral and extra curricular areas.

Finding and interpreting educational research can be a challenge for teachers. Image source here.

A primer on the ‘what works’ debate, with key sources and a discussion of its pros and cons.

I recently joined and met with SURE - ‘School and University Research Enquiry’, a research group which has put several schools in the Glasgow area in contact with the University of Strathclyde in order to exchange knowledge and conduct new research. The ultimate aim is to promote a more evidence-informed approach to educational decision making and practice.

With this in mind, I thought it would be helpful to write a brief overview of the field of evidence-based education, including some of the main publications and debates.

What is it?

Firstly, evidence-based education is the idea that research of various kinds should be used to inform decisions about teaching and learning. It is conceived of as an alternative to teaching practice that is guided by intuition and/or experience.

An educator’s job includes a huge amount of decision making. For example, what should be taught today? What about tomorrow? What type of homework should be set, and when? How can a teacher maintain discipline effectively, and engage their pupils? Evidence-based education aims to tackle these questions pragmatically on the basis of past findings, and is sometimes referred to as a 'what works' approach.

Focusing on the example of homework, a traditional view might be that the teacher should allocate whatever they judge to be useful, or whatever is just ‘the way it’s done’ (or whatever is lying around the office, is quick to mark, or is in the textbook/revision guide!). An evidence-based alternative would be to look at this issue from the perspective of research which has shown that some strategies lead to more effective/durable learning than others - the cognitive psychology of memory tells us that learners remember more if there is a delay before they practice material that they have mastered in class, and that they remember more if they do a closed-book test rather than copying from notes. The teacher may therefore decide to set a practice test, and to do so after a one-week delay rather than on the same day as the material was done in class.

The above example relates to memory, and the what works approach as a whole usually refers to techniques or interventions that boost attainment (as measured by some form of test or exam), but evidence could inform many other types of decision too. For example, when considering an issue such as student motivation, evidence could be evaluated to help determine the most effective way to proceed.

As a model, this borrows from the philosophy behind evidence-based medicine. We would probably take it for granted that a doctor should select a treatment that has been shown by reliable (and replicated) research to be the most effective, rather than being guided by tradition (leeches, anyone?) or their individual gut feeling about what ought to work. In the same way, it is argued, teachers should look to the evidence rather than relying on their personal preferences or even on classroom experience. Insisting on evidence may have the incidental advantage of making educational practices less vulnerable to fads, such as the learning styles myth.

Sounds great! So everyone agrees with this…?

No! It has many critics, and their points are well worth taking on board. Firstly, the idea that education can derive a model of effective practice from medicine is open to doubt. Learning is not really like curing an illness - it’s cumulative, has no clearly defined end point, and there are important subtleties such as how well it can be transferred to new situations. The entire approach could therefore be seen as over-simplistic.

Secondly, what works for one group might not work for all. To take one example, Kalyuga (2007) has described the ‘expertise reversal effect’ whereby tasks that are effective with beginners become ineffective or at least inefficient when used with more advanced learners. Another example, much discussed in recent years, is that homework appears to be more effective for secondary students than for primary (Cooper et al, 2006). This is not a killer blow to the idea of evidence-based practice, but it does suggest that the use of evidence must be cautious and thoughtful - we can’t apply one-size-fits-all solutions.

Thirdly, there are concerns about the validity of some of the evidence used. Education is a notoriously tricky area to research - for ethical reasons it is often necessary to rely on correlations and secondary data, leaving some findings open to confounding variables. Meanwhile, a lot of the research evidence from cognitive psychology in areas such as working memory and learning is based on laboratory studies with university students. That doesn’t make it inherently bad research, but does mean that we should be cautious about generalising it to school pupils.

Finally - and linked to the previous point - some people argue that the evidence referred to in this approach is often positivist in its underlying scientific philosophy, whereas many educators and learning researchers subscribe to a social constructivist view of learning.

Key literature

There is a lot of literature in this field, including both empirical research studies and reviews. For anyone who is new to this area, these are a few very useful publications to get you started. In the main they come from proponents of the idea, but I've also included some key critiques:

Gert Biesta here criticises evidence-based practice and also questions the broader assumption that closely-controlled lab work has ever contributed much to society (!). He argues that it tends to link to top-down approaches where administrators and governments say that strategies work on the basis of lab research, when they may not work in a specific context. Additionally, the notion of something working doesn’t address philosophical issues of who it works for, and to what social end.

Coe et al (2014)’s report ‘What makes Great Teaching?’ is useful in that it goes beyond the cognitive evidence and considers such issues as classroom climate, teacher knowledge levels, and how teachers can improve. Otherwise, it draws on a similar body of research to Dunlosky et al (2013; see below). The Sutton Trust also back the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Teaching and Learning Toolkit’, which provides a useful (if rather undiscriminating) visual guide to evidence-based strategies in terms of cost, lasting impact and the security of the supporting research.

The authors are psychologists and memory researchers, and this paper reviews a number of different findings from cognitive psychology. In particular, it endorses the use of retrieval practice (the ‘testing effect’) and distributed practice (the ‘spacing effect’), while noting that techniques such as re-reading and highlighting are generally ineffective as study strategies.

Australian researcher John Hattie is probably the biggest name in this field; he has synthesised numerous meta-analyses of educational research and built up a list of interventions together with their average statistical effect size. He takes an effect size of 0.4 as a 'hinge point' above which interventions fall into (roughly) the top half, i.e. they are among the more effective interventions - but the higher the effect size, the better. The work is also helpful in identifying some interventions that have tended not to make a large impact. It has its flaws, both conceptual and statistical, but it’s a useful starting place for finding out about several important strategies.

It’s useful to be aware of the work of Marzano et al (2001), one of the earlier evidence-based summaries of effective teaching interventions. The strategies they endorse include analogies and metaphors, student-generated study notes, and feedback/formative assessment. There have been important new findings and some of the key research questions have moved on a bit since it came out, however, so it is a bit dated.

The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) in the USA offers the ’What Works Clearinghouse’. It usefully reviews studies of efficacy in terms of learning, but the focus tends to be on large-scale programmes, for example the “Great Explorations in Math and Science® (GEMS®) Space Science Sequence” curriculum, rather than on specific techniques that teachers could use in class. This makes their findings less immediately applicable.

In his paper ‘What works may hurt’, Zhao refers back to the analogy of evidence-based medicine and borrows a further concept - that of side effects. From this perspective, an intervention may ‘work’ from a learning point of view, but it could have any number of side effects. Just as with a drug, any benefits must be evaluated in that context. For example, an intervention that boosts learning over the short-term could also harm motivation over the longer term.

Is all of this a threat to teachers?

It is worth considering: does all of this amount to self-proclaimed experts telling us what to do (or what not to do)? At times that might be a valid concern, but the entire nature of making education more evidence based is that that evidence is (or can be) open to scrutiny. You may not agree with all of the conclusions from the sources above, but their arguments are probably backed up by a more thorough factual base than the opinion of a staffroom colleague. And if you are unsure, then you are free to scrutinise and evaluate the sources.

A problem, certainly, lies with teachers’ access to information. If teachers can’t or won’t access the evidence themselves, this puts a lot of power in the hands of central institutions who may try to push inappropriate programmes and interventions. Teachers (and schools more broadly) are in a stronger position to ward this off if they not only learn about the evidence but are also aware of its limitations.

For this to happen, practitioners require journal access, CPD time, and also the skills to critique the research methods and statistics used. How can that be achieved? This BERA report sets out a vision of schools and colleges as "research-rich environments in which to work" (p.5). It's a radical idea, and one that asks us to reconsider the very nature of what teacher professionalism involves.

Retrieval practice can be used in a huge range of learning tasks. Image by Deb Stgo.

The testing effect is a well-known psychological phenomena whereby people remember things better if they are tested on them. The benefits don't stem just from getting feedback on right or wrong answers - although that can help too. It appears that the process of retrieving information from memory actually helps it to be consolidated. In other words, a test can make the memory more secure and less likely to be forgotten.

So what role should tests play in the learning process? This phenomenon can certainly be applied to self-testing during revision; students who do this appear to get better grades (see Hartwig & Dunlosky, 2012). Self-questioning of a text has also been linked to superior recall and understanding compared to re-reading (Pressley et al., 1990).

More broadly, questioning can help to pique curiosity - leading to the surprising finding that even being tested before you have been taught the information can boost subsequent attainment (the 'pretesting effect').

However, testing can play a much broader role in the classroom than just revision activities. Memory research in this area suggests that retrieval of information plays a fundamental role in the way a new memory forms.

A key research study

A 2006 study by Henry Roediger III and Jeffrey Karpicke has become a classic in this area, and is highly illuminating to teachers. They compared memory for a text after studying (S) it and/or being tested (T) on it. They found that study opportunities followed by a test where students wrote down everything they could remember (S-S-S-T) was led to better recall than being given an additional study opportunity (S-S-S-S). More surprisingly, a single reading followed by three tests (S-T-T-T) was best of all, even though no feedback was given on any of the tests.

An additional point to note from the Roediger and Karpicke study is that the advantage was only shown after a 1 week delay - if recall was assessed after just a few minutes, the study-only conditions were better. This is important, as it suggests that testing helped to prevent forgetting in long-term memory; participants in the S-S-S-S condition forgot far more (52%) than those in the S-S-S-T condition (28%), with participants in the S-T-T-T condition forgetting least of all (14%).

Current status

A huge amount of research has been done on this area over the past 10 years or so since the Roediger & Karpicke paper, many of them using educationally relevant materials. Benefits that were first established in psychology labs have been shown to apply to real world learning situations such as a middle school science classroom (e.g. McDaniel et al, 2011).

It is easy to measure the testing effect with simple facts or word lists, and the extent to which the benefit extends to more complex materials has been questioned (e.g. van Gog & Sweller, 2015; see also Karpicke & Aue, 2015). However, the effect has been shown with a wide range of real-world tasks including texts, and Smith et al (2010) found that being tested on material from a passage also improved later knowledge of items that had not been tested (in comparison to a re-reading control condition), suggesting that it does promote integrated understanding. Overall, the current research seems to suggest that most teachers and learners in most learning situations would benefit from increasing the level of retrieval used, i.e. the amount that learners have to actively recall things from memory, and that this should be preferred to re-reading or re-teaching as a learning strategy.

Indeed, the research into retrieval practice can prompt a new way of thinking about learning as a whole - that although initial exposure to material and ideas is clearly necessary, that the actual learning takes place when we retrieve and use the information. Otherwise, forgetting can be quite rapid. Nevertheless, this area of psychology is still developing and it is important to keep an eye on new findings and possible boundary conditions as they emerge.

Educational implications

Despite its name, the testing effect does not just apply to tests - and more recently, researchers have tended to prefer the term 'retrieval practice' rather than testing effect (e.g. Karpicke et al, 2014), because retrieval is a key process in learning, while the term 'testing' tends to imply assessment. Of course, setting a class test is just one way of prompting students to retrieve information from memory; other methods could include:

- Direct verbal questioning

- Self-questioning

- Writing notes from memory

- Using flashcards

- Writing essays

- Group discussion

The key factor in all cases is that information is actively retrieved rather than passively heard or re-read - a principle that can be applied to any subject discipline. A straightforward method for a teacher who uses Powerpoint would be to insert slides with short questions, either at the end or throughout (see Weinstein et al, 2016, for a discussion of the relative efficacy of interspersing question slides v's testing at the end).

It is also relatively easy to pair retrieval practice with other evidence based interventions, such as distributed learning. Roediger & Pyc (2012) described both retrieval practice and distributed learning as 'low-hanging fruit' in terms of possible educational interventions - in comparison to the millions that are spent on technological innovations, they are quick, easy and cheap to implement.

Overall, a large body of research suggests that integrating more opportunities for retrieval practice into our teaching will improve learners' long-term retention of facts and understanding of concepts.

Research for teachers can take many forms, from subject-based work to more general education projects. Image by Leo Hidalgo.

Can teachers engage in research? And if so, should they be supported in doing so?

It has been great to be involved in the launch and running of Scotland's first school-based research centre over the past two years. This work has included running a research conference for our senior pupils with external visiting speakers, establishing an ethics approval procedure for teacher projects, and managing a number of collaborations including a research fellowship for visiting researcher Anna Beck of the University of Strathclyde.

My own experience is that teacher research is valuable but not always valued. Engaging in research is one of the most valuable CPD activities I can think of, boosting my skills while making me more aware of educational debates and evidence. But practical support for teacher research in terms of time or funding depends on it being seen as a priority, and there is an inherent potential conflict with heavy teaching timetables and the need to focus on pupil attainment.

What is the status of teacher research?

The role of research in a school teacher's job is in some ways a philosophical question: we all agree that it is good for students to do research projects, but should teachers, similarly, be researchers? If so, how does that sit alongside their other duties, and is it actually 'research' at all (or 'action research', or 'practitioner enquiry', or... whatever).

Terminology is not central, but it does matter - if we use a word other than 'research', are we effectively saying from the outset that teachers are not 'proper' researchers, and that there is an essential divide between school and university staff? No doubt the quality of any research work will depend on professional abilities, but these can be developed - and already there are many teachers who have attained research degrees, and some who have published in peer-reviewed journals. Others have the potential to do so with the right support.

Regardless of the output in terms of publication, I feel that teacher research can foster curiosity, develop skills and prompt engagement with the current research literature. It can also lead to useful engagement with the broader research community. These have to be good things for a school and for education as a whole.

What next?

The Scottish Association for Educational Research has recently launched a network for early career researchers, and I'm really pleased to see that school-based researchers have been included from the start. We have a lot in common with PhD students and postdocs, and face many of the same challenges. It will also be important to engage with the FE sector as time goes on.

If you are interested in teacher research and want to find out more about how to develop a research centre in your school, or are simply looking for some support and advice, please do get in touch.

Role of evolution in memory

Beyond a general acknowledgement that our brains and cognitive abilities are the product of evolution, human memory research has largely ignored our evolutionary history, focusing on short-term processing (see Bahrick, 2005) and using tasks which take little account of the context in which things are encountered in the real world.

An important advance was made when James Nairne and colleagues conducted an experiment demonstrating that people remember information better when they process it in a grasslands scenario. In an ingenious study, participants were shown a list of words such as truck, juice, chair and sword and were then asked to rate how relevant these objects were to the following scenario:

Remarkably, in a later surprise test, participants remembered the words significantly better having thought about them in this context compared to the other conditions used in the experiment - one of which involved a moving house scenario, and the other required participants simply to think about the pleasantness of the word (a standard memory intervention which promotes deep processing).

If this sounds like a fluke, the effect has been replicated several times and by many different researchers; other comparison scenarios have been tried - for example a bank robbery (Kang et al, 2008), zombies in the city (Soderstrom & McCabe, 2011), and even an 'in the afterlife' scenario (Röer et al, 2013) - but none have proved superior or even equal in promoting recall of a set of items.

Is this truly 'survival processing'?

A simple but very general question arises from this work - assuming that our evolution has prepared us to do certain things better than others, how specific are these abilities? Have we really been hard-wired to process grasslands survival situations better than other situations in a way that affects all of human memory today?

Alternatively, is the grasslands research scenario somehow drawing on a more general aspect of memory that the other scenarios fail to tap into?

My reading of the research literature so far gives the impression that many researchers are trying their best to demonstrate the latter. Three particularly interesting possibilities include:

- It causes us to plan more more than other scenarios, and planning leads to better encoding to memory (Klein, 2014).

- It causes us to encode items more richly (Bell et al, 2015). Elaborative encoding is well known to benefit long-memory - which, after all, is based on making meaningful connections.

- It allows for more creative thinking in terms of how the objects are used. In keeping with this possibility, Wilson (2016) found that a grasslands scenario was also better at promoting creative thinking about object uses than any of the other widely used comparison conditions. If we think creatively about something, we may well remember it better due to the generation effect.

The exact variables at play are still under investigation, and it could be a combination of these factors - the grasslands scenario may promote more creative, future-focused and meaningful thought processes. It is curious, however, how no other scenario has so far proved to be comparably successful in boosting memory - at least with the original tasks and materials.

What does this mean for education?

As a relatively new area of research, survival processing has not yet had a significant impact on education, but it does have potential. With further testing, a set of principles could be established, allowing classroom activities to be designed to incorporate elements of risk/danger, future planning, creativity, etc.

Survival processing is not the only possible effect of evolution on memory that could impact on education. For example, we also remember animals better than inanimate objects - an effect which has been trialled for use in the learning of language vocabulary (Nairne, 2016).

More broadly, many of the most robust findings from the study of memory make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. The spacing effect, for example, fits with the idea that any animal needs to deal with a one-off problem, but needn't waste mental resources storing the responses long-term. In contrast, if something happens periodically with time gaps in between - a type of food that grows seasonally, migrating predators or occasional floods, for example - the adaptive response is to create a more lasting mental record of any any relevant details as well as successful responses that we have previously used.

The classic Zeigarnik effect - incomplete tasks being better remembered than complete ones - also fits well with a scenario where an unfinished task could be a matter of life or death.

Clearly, we can't deliver entire school courses via a grasslands scenario like the one described above. We could, however, pay more attention to the ways in which memory has evolved to work, and establish ways of building these principles into classroom tasks.

Klein, S.B. (2014). Evolution, memory and the role of self-referrant recall in planning for the future. In B.L. Schwarz, M.L. Howe, M.P. Toglia and H. Otgaar (Eds.) What is Adaptive about Adaptive Memory? pp. 11-34. Oxford: OUP.

Wilson, S. (2016). Divergent thinking in the grasslands: thinking about object function in the context of a grassland survival scenario elicits more alternate uses than control scenarios. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1-13.

Most students take notes during lessons, but are they adding information to memory? Image by Nick Olejniczak

I believe that memory is very important in education. This might seem obvious - of course children and students need to remember things. Perhaps it also seems threatening - reducing education to mere passive memorisation?

I don’t think so.

In my view, improving how we use memory is not threatening because remembering is essential regardless of your view of how teaching should be done, or what the syllabus should consist of. Whether you are talking about lectures or discovery learning, a minimum requirement is that the pupils retain some of the information that you have been teaching, and develop skills and understanding over the long-term.

Indeed, educational approaches tend to be judged, at least in part, according to whether people remember anything in terms of their performance on tasks (real or artificial) or tests at a later date. As a learner, a class might be a lot of fun, but I would ask myself whether it was a worthwhile use of my time if I later couldn’t remember anything about it.

Perhaps memory can seem to be a threat because it appears reductive - breaking education down to a list of testable facts. But actually, this may just be a matter of definition; cognitive psychology takes a broader view of memory than that used in everyday speech, and includes any change in behaviour or thinking. This could include developing our creative skills, for example, or our ability to write an essay. There are, of course, various different types of memory - memory for a fact, an experience, a task, and so on. But all of them require, on some level, that the learner takes something in, and that it persists for long enough to affect their future actions and/or thoughts.

As for the role of memory being obvious, well… Perhaps something so fundamental should be seen as obvious, but as such it is easily ignored and neglected. I’d argue that the role of memory is not prominent in current educational debates, and plays too small a role (if any) in teacher training and CPD.

When we talk about improving education, we are essentially saying that we want pupils to do better at maths, science, languages, social science etc, in a way that will allow them to:

pass exams

retain skills that they can use in future

This means that they need to retain key facts (such as what hydrogen is) and skills (such as how to multiply two fractions) for long enough not just to pass an assessment, but also to use it an unspecified period of time in the future - i.e. it must be retained in long-term memory, and be amenable to transfer.

The newly re-elected Scottish Government has made it very clear that education is a top political priority, and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has highlighted that we must try to ‘close the attainment gap’ in terms of the academic under-peformance of the least well-off young people in our society. I would certainly commend that sentiment. I would also suggest that interventions that have been shown to improve attainment exist in the psychology research literature, and has increasingly been applied to real settings and with authentic learning material.

What’s more, any such interventions - although they can help everybody - are likely to benefit to the lowest achievers most. This is simply because the less you have learned up to now, the greater the potential for improvement; the worse your study habits, the more you can improve them. In contrast, some other possible interventions tend to preferentially help higher achievers, for example more homework or smaller classes.

A major challenge, then, is to engage with the wealth of scientific research on memory that is out there, digest it, and communicate it in a way that teachers, learners and parents can actually use. There needs to be an increased psychological literacy when it comes to human memory - we need to understand how our own learning processes work, and how to use them better.

Coursework, data analysis, revision... It can be hard to concentrate on a task all day, or even for an hour or two! Which, of course, can lead to procrastination, and to short breaks that become long breaks.

The pomodoro technique is a method of time management that encourages us to focus for 25 minute spells, each followed by a shorter break of 5 minutes or so.

Why 25 minutes?

The exact time can depend on the individual - each of us has a different attention span - but 25 minutes is brief enough that most people can keep up concentration even on a dull or repetitive task, especially with the prospect of an imminent break.

Why such short breaks?

A 3-5 minute break is considered ideal, because it gives your eyes and mind a rest, but avoids stopping for so long that you lose track of what you are doing. Suitable break activities could include going for a short walk outside, getting yourself a drink, doing some press-ups, or playing a tune on a musical instrument.

However don't worry - after 4 'pomodoros', you are advised to take a longer break of 20-30 mins. So you will get your lunch!

Why 'pomodoro'?

Pomodoro means 'tomato'; the technique is the creation of Francesco Cirillo who initially used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to time his 25 minute work periods. He explains that the action of twisting the timer and the mechanical 'clicks' as it slowly revolves are helpful to boost focus (Cirillo, 2012).

But really, any shape of timer will do!

Personally, I am more likely to use the timer of my phone - and you can also download apps specifically for this purpose, some of which are free. I have found the technique very useful for breaking up long and concentration-intensive work, such as marking a stack of exam papers. I think it would be ideal for revision, too.

If you have tried the technique, why not share your views in the comments?